Google maps has made it incredibly easy to add an interactive map to your website. The video below shows how easy it can be. If you have a Waypoint site, we show how you can add it there, but it can be easily added to any HTML page.
A new SPAM/Scam trend is hitting users all over the internet. Beware of email messages like the following:
From: YourDomain.com support
Subject: setting for your mailbox you@yourdomain.com are changed
Message: SMTP and POP3 servers for you@yourdomain.com mailbox are changed. Please carefully read the attached instructions before updating settings.
Attachment: either a zip file, or sometimes a link to a zip file, often on google groups.
DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENT! IT IS A VIRUS.
Immediately delete and/or mark the message as spam. If you do not open the attachment, you are safe from the virus, but opening it can harm your computer.
For our email hosting customers, we are looking into steps we can take to help our spam filters find the messages and stop them from appearing in your inbox. They are arriving frequently for many users at this time. The spam filters are improving but are still not getting them all. We will be doing anything we can to help lower the volume of spam, however it may take some time for the spam filters to learn about this new trend.
Thank you for your patience
Twin Harbor Support Team
We’re very excited today to announce a really cool new feature now available in all Waypoint sites! The Code Block widget has been upgraded to include support for <form> tags, and other types of content. As explained in the video, the code block widget allows you to post nearly any html content right onto your page. One major limitation of this was form tags. Waypoint is built on ASP.NET, which wraps the entire page in a form tag. Since forms are not allowed inside other forms, certain code blocks would not function, including PayPal buttons. A new feature resolves this: wrap in iframe. An iframe allows us to have a page within a page, and thus, a form within a form. Now you can use a code block widget, paste in your PayPal button code, choose “wrap in iframe” and viola! You now have your PayPal button or other form code working on your website!
Do your computer or car speakers buzz when your cellphone is nearby? Today I found a great way to stop this and it won’t cost you a dime. Do you know those silvery-looking anti-static bags computer parts come in? Save them. If you set your phone down on one it disrupts the electromagnetic field the cellphone creates and stops the buzzing completely.
You can find these bags:
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could add a video right to one of your tabs on your Facebook fan page? Now you can!
First, just set up a tab with the FBML application. The following FBML snippet will help you get started. I’ve marked in the areas that need special attention. See below for how to swap them out and where to get each item.
<fb:swf swfsrc="{__SWF_source.swf__}?v={__videoid__}&ev=0" flashvars="video_autoplay=1&video_src={__url.mp4__}&fbt_play_again=Play+Again" imgsrc="{__thumb_URL__}" width="{__width_in_px__}" height="{__height_in_px__}" imgstyle="width:{__width__}px; height: {__height__}px;" />Each of the sections marked in {__} needs to be replaced. To get the values you need, you need to go to the video tab in your page and find the video you’re trying to add. You can click View Source and dig through the code, but the easiest way to do this by far is to use Firefox with FireBug. Firebug is a plugin that will allow you to quickly see the HTML associated with an element on the page. Once installed, navigate to the page with your video on it and click on the little bug in the bottom right corner of the browser. The firebug panel will appear at the bottom of the screen. Click on the small blue arrow and you’ll be able to mouse-over elements on the page and see the corresponding HTML code below. Each of the elements below are easily found by using firebug to get the block of code for the video on that page.
Firebug in action:
Sample HTML code from a Facebook video:
<embed width="756" height="540" flashvars="video_id=1189859419627&video_length=348680&video_seconds=348&video_category=0&video_rotation=0&fbt_play_again=Play+Again&fbt_go_to_video=Go+to+Video&fbt_next_video=Next+Video&fbt_share=Share&play_context=6&connect_to_owner=0&share_id=s%3D11%26appid%3D2392950137%26p%5B%5D%3D1189859419627&video_player_type=video_player_hq_permalink&lowqual_width=400&lowqual_height=300&highqual_width=716&highqual_height=540&lowqual_stage_width=500&lowqual_stage_height=300&highqual_stage_width=756&highqual_stage_height=540&video_width=716&video_height=540&mvp_connect=1&stage_width=756&stage_height=540&video_owner_name=Twin+Harbor+Web+Solutions%2C+Inc&video_owner_href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Ftwinharbor&video_src=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.ak.facebook.com%2Fvideo-ak-sf2p%2Fv2686%2F179%2F52%2F1189859419627_4540.mp4&video_timestamp=Added+about+7+months+ago&video_title=Waypoint+Site+Traffic+Statistics+%5BHQ%5D&thumb_url=http%3A%2F%2Fvthumb.ak.fbcdn.net%2Fvthumb-ak-sf2p%2Fv2336%2F126%2F107%2F1022602683%2Fb1022602683_1189859419627_1403.jpg&highqual_src=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.ak.facebook.com%2Fvideo-ak-sf2p%2Fv6808%2F179%2F52%2F1189859419627_43357.mp4&lowqual_src=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.ak.facebook.com%2Fvideo-ak-sf2p%2Fv2686%2F179%2F52%2F1189859419627_4540.mp4&fbt_lowqual=View+in+Regular+Quality&fbt_highqual=View+in+High+Quality&highqual_is_on=1&motion_log=%2Fvideo%2Fmotion_log.php&histogram_is_on=1&video_autoplay=0&width=756&height=540&user=1022602683&log=no&div_id=id_4b96b2d08bb3b1bffb4f1&swf_id=swf_id_4b96b2d08bb3b1bffb4f1&browser=Mozilla%2FNetscape+6.x&string_table=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.ak.fbcdn.net%2Fflash_strings.php%2Ft88067%2Fen_US" wmode="opaque" scale="noscale" salign="tl" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" quality="high" bgcolor="#000000" name="swf_id_4b96b2d08bb3b1bffb4f1" id="swf_id_4b96b2d08bb3b1bffb4f1" style="" src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/z4HBM/hash/3krgnmig.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash">SWF Source
This is the source of the SWF file (flash file) that acts as the player. Look for the URL that ends in .swf (highlighted in red above).
MP4 Source
This is the only somewhat tricky part. You need to specify the source video file, an MP4 file. It’s in there, but a little harder to see. I’ve highlighted the part you want in green this time. It looks like this:
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Ftwinharbor&video_src=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.ak.facebook.com%2Fvideo-ak-sf2p%2Fv2686%2F179%2F52%2F1189859419627_4540.mp4
Why does this look so weird? It’s encoded. Encoding essentially means, you can take one URL, and pass it as a parameter inside of another URL, but you have to encode the special characters. Take this URL and decode it back to normal by using an online URL decoder, found here. Paste it in, hit decode, and you’ve got your URL.
Video ID
This is the long number also highlighted in red above. This will tell the player which video to load.
Width and Height
The width and height of the video are customizable. The originals are specified in orange above. You can choose to display the video in a smaller space if you like. You need to specify them manually, both the width and the height. You also need to specify them twice; once in a style tag, once in attributes right on the main tag. Doing it twice helps browser compatibility. Internet explorer doesn’t respect the element attributes, so you need to add the style tag to make sure it works everywhere.
You should also be aware of proportions. Sometimes you need to do a little algebra to get the video to the correct size. The formula is simply, W1/H1 = W2/H2. I suppose a separate post is in order for that bit.
Thumb URL
You’ll want to specify a thumbnail URL. This is the image that displays before you click and play the movie.
Other Notes
Sometimes when looking for a bug in web software, you need to find everything that touches a particular database table. In Visual Studio, this is as simple as a global search. But in SQL, you might also want to find every stored procedure that references that table. A quick search online found a great little SQL script that does just that. Here’s what to do:
SELECT Name FROM sys.procedures WHERE OBJECT_DEFINITION(OBJECT_ID) LIKE '%tblMyTable%' GO
Thanks to SqlAuthority.com for this code snippet.
Working in Parallels certainly has its quirks. It’s great to be able to get the smooth interface of Mac’s OSX and still be able to run those apps you just need Windows for (Visual Studio, SQL and other developer tools in my case.) But sometimes, little quirks can drive you mad! For a while now I’ve been lamenting how scroll speed worked inside of parallels. I was using a Microsoft wireless USB mouse which has a scroll wheel which “clicks” as it turns. Each click scrolls down a chunk of the screen. On the Mac side, scrolling was fairly smooth, although still it moved down in chunks. Recently I got, (christmas gift, thank’s to my wife 
) a new Apple Magic Mouse. I was excited at the prospect of smoother scrolling! When scanning a long page I like to slowly creep down the page. When the page would jump in large chunks, you couldn’t keep scanning the page as you moved. The large move made you lose your place. OK so this sounds like a bit of a whiney type of complaint, but when you spend as much time as I do scanning over text and code, these little things start to matter! So I was happy to see mac applications have the smoothest scrolling from a mouse I’ve ever had. Wonderful! Then on to parallels. Smoother than before, but still pretty choppy. But then I found something that made things a lot better!
The Parallels Mouse Scroll Fix
Inside Windows, there’s an option that helps smooth the scrolling. This will work for all mice I imagine.
Start >> Control Panel >> Mouse (This path varies depending on your windows install)
Click over to the Wheel tab and there is an option to select the number of lines to jump on each scroll interval. Set it to 1, the lowest allowed. Mine was set to 3 by default (windows server 2003). Setting it down to 1 helped a LOT!
We are happy to announce the latest release of Waypoint! There are several new features we have added and this video shows you a few of them. All existing Waypoint sites have already been automatically upgraded, so log in now to see it all!
